Index to all release notes

Update 5, Armies of Isengard Release Notes

Of Special Note

Isengard Instances are here!

Five new instances have been added, rounding out the challenges of the Rise of Isengard Expansion. These instances are free to all players who purchased the Rise of Isengard Expansion. If you have not purchased the expansion pack, these instances will also be available a la carte in the LOTRO Store. Learn more about these instances in the Developer Diary.

The Epic Story Continues

The time has come for you to part ways with the Grey Company. Update Five will see the Rangers continue with their mission while steering clear of the coming war for as long as possible. You, however, will be taking on the tasks set forth in, Volume III, Book 5: ‘The Prince of Rohan.’.

Instance Finder

Instance Finder is a new tool that will help players form and fill Fellowships to tackle the various instances, raids and skirmishes found throughout Middle-earth. With Update 5 the first phase of the Instance finder will be available to players. This initial implementation does have some limitations and restrictions. We’ll be improving the system in future updates and look forward to hearing your feedback and input on ways to make Instance Finder better. Currently, Instance Finder allows you to set the following options:

Content: Skirmishes, Isengard Instances, and/or Scaled Instances

Scale: Solo, 2-man, 3-man, and/or 6-man

Difficulty: Tier I, II, and/or III difficulty

Role: Defence, DPS, Healer, Support

Once a player or partial group places themselves in queue, the system will intelligently match them with other players for a random instance within their selected parameters. Once a match is found, the system will notify the player who can then accept the match and travel immediately to the instance. In addition, while using the Instance Finder, players can take advantage of additional bonuses and rewards! Full details of this new tool and some of our plans for improving it in the future can be found in the developer diary.

Track Nearby Quests

A new option has been added to the Quest Tracker and the Radar called “Track Nearby Quests.” Track Nearby Quests works by finding up to five quests in your quest log with nearby objectives, and attempting to add them to the Quest Tracker. Only unlocked quests in the quest tracker will be replaced in this way. If all the quests in the tracker are locked, you will receive an error message.

Additional notes:

Track Nearby Quests doesn't work when you are within an interior location (a dungeon) or an encounter. The options are hidden in this case. If you trigger Track Nearby Quests via an input action while in a dungeon, you'll get an error message.

Track Nearby Quests only looks for nearby quests, not for deeds.

Unified Currency

All the various marks and tokens that appear in Skirmishes and Classic Instances are being collapsed into three new currencies; Marks, Medallions and Seals. These three currencies will also be used in the new Isengard instance cluster, as well as future instances. A complete explanation can be found in the Developer Diary, but here’s a quick look at what’s changing:

Wait, what? In practice, this should change little about how Skirmishes, Classic Instances and Instance Clusters are played. Enter an instance, collect currency for beating bosses and taking control points, than spend it at barter vendors. The big change is that now all instances share three main currencies, instead of a wide variety of special marks. This will greatly simplify things and draw a strong line between the gameplay styles.

What about all my stuff? When Update 5 launches, all of the various marks will be converted into Marks, Medallions or Seals automatically. Skirmish Marks will become Marks, though acquired Skirmish traits will be unchanged. To be specific, the following items will disappear from the game and be replaced with some amount of the new currencies:

Lua Plugin Manager

At long last, a manager UI has been added to support all of your Lua plugins!

During character selection, you can open the manager via the “Manage Plugins” button. There you can define which plugins you would like to load automatically each time you log in with the characters selected via a drop-down menu present for each plugin entry. Please note: the character selection list includes both normal characters and monster play characters linked to your account on the given server.

You can also access the manager when in game (logged in) via a start menu entry under the system sub-menu for both normal characters and monster play characters. Here, you will not only be able to change the auto-loading status of your plugins, but you can also immediately load/unload plugins.

The in game plugin manager also introduces support for plugin-defined option panels that can be accessed by hitting the “Options” tab when a plugin is selected. What these options do for a given plugin is completely defined by the plugin authors. If a given plugin has not defined an options panel, then the tab will be disabled.

It’s the little things that count

Coffee is here! After much lobbying by players and quoting of various passages in Tolkien’s works, coffee is now available! Westfold Famers will have new recipes to grow the aromatic beans for Westfold Cooks who wish to concoct this stimulating beverage!

Release Notes

General

We have re-balanced a few of the ratings granted by some items to increase their impact. This primarily affects avoidance ratings (block, parry and evade) but some critical ratings and incoming healing ratings are also affected.

All items that currently have Melee Offence, Ranged Offence, Tactical Offence or Outgoing Healing ratings have been changed to have either Physical Mastery (Melee Offence and Ranged Offence) or Tactical Mastery (Tactical Offence and Outgoing Healing). These Mastery ratings function in all ways like the replaced ratings only the Mastery works for both at the same time.

Multiple barter item currencies have been consolidated down into 3 new currency types. There is now a tutorial hint which describes the conversion process and only appears if the conversion has affected you.

When earning the new item currencies that are placed in your Barter Wallet, you will receive overhead text showing you how much you just earned.

All containers now have particle effects to help distinguish them from the landscape.

After much consideration the mystery meat inside the cafeteria burritos shall remain a mystery. Trust us, it's better that way.

Fixed an issue that could prevent a new character who skipped the tutorial from receiving the Basic Training passive skill.

The Ale Association quest "An Inn League Disaster" unfortunately had to be removed from the game... Some changes were made to world event scheduling, and this quest did not get along well with the changes!

Hunter

Lore-master

The Lore-master's Spirit of Nature companion has been upgraded. Its Flashing Flank skill now has a 45 second cooldown. Its Nature's Gift healing skill no longer requires the Spirit's sacrifice. The Spirit of Nature will no longer accumulate threat for any action that it takes nor from any threat transferred to it. The Physical and Tactical mitigations of the Spirit have been much increased. Finally, and most importantly, the Spirit is now a Creature of Nature.

The Spirit of Nature also has an Aura effect that reduces an enemy's chance to hit by 5%.

The Deed, Magic Adept, was moved to a level 60 only skill as part of the Rise of Isengard launch. This has been fixed. Burning Embers will now increase this deed starting at level 30 in addition to Sticky Gourd. All improved versions of these skills will advance the deed as well.

Warden

Aggression now properly uses aggression in potent and non-potent states. It also provides the correct information in its tooltip.

Never Surrender and the associated debuff version now have the correct icons.

Way of the Warden now includes a bonus to Critical Defence equivalent to the benefit gained with Determination.

Never Surrender has been changed: The ability is activated by the Warden and will last for five minutes. During those five minutes the Warden cannot be defeated unless their health drops below 10%. At this point, they are healed for 50% of the Morale and Power (Both based off of maximum power) and they can now be defeated as normal. Cool down on the skill is 15 minutes.

Shield Tactics will now apply the stun immunity buff when the skill is activated.

Warden heals have been adjusted to scale with elevated monster damage added with RoI.

The new effect that provides wardens with a boost in their partial defensives has had it's duration increased to 20 seconds.

Monster Play

General

Creep Resistance potions have been converted to the new Resistance Rating stat. Since this now makes one set of the potions redundant, Phial of Mazauk's Saliva/Blood have been removed from barter and loot. The existing potions will remain accessible to players that had acquired them before this change, but they provide the same benefit as Phial of Gorgoris' Bile/Blood and do not stack.

Monster players can now open their Traits panel with the same hotkey (default: 'J') as Free Peoples.

Existing monster player characters logging in for the first time in Rise of Isengard will now see trainable traits on the Monster Player Trainers without having to relog.

New Creep Skill “March!” A new skill has been added to each Creep's starting skill set: “March!”. This skill increases Creep out of combat movement speed by 32%- enabling them to traverse the map more efficiently. This skill toggles off the moment the Creep enters combat.

The existing Root Duration modifier on items has been replaced with a new (functional, I swear) property that reduces the duration of roots applied to the target by a percent.

Hotspot effects (Traps, Blight, Banners, etc) now work on the Troll and Ranger

Troll & Ranger auto-attack damage significantly increased

Ranger quest is now removed on log-out.

Delving of Frór: Boss monsters now have a chance to drop Creep consumables.

Chieftain Fimfash: Chieftain Fimfash's health has been increased to match that of his Freep counterpart.

Battlefield Promotions: Icons now match the rank they unlock at.

Lainedhal's Insignias and Akulhun's Brands have had their usage cooldowns reduced. These now range from 120 minutes for the Rank 1 version of the insignia/brand to 5 minutes for the Rank 15 version of the insignia/brand.

Burglar PvMP Armour -Boots, Legs, and Helm have had their stats revised to include Agility.

Containers now have particle effects to help distinguish them from the landscape.

Delving of Frór Movement Speed potions have been removed from barter and loot. Potions currently in player inventory will not be removed, but the effect will not stack with Mobilize and March and their potency has been reduced to 5/7/10% from 10/15/20%

Metalsmith

Prospector

Scholar

New Lore-master parable recipes are now available for the Scholar profession. Novice Scholar trainers sell the Journeyman recipe while higher tier versions can be found in treasure.

UI

Quest reward items with very long names now get more space to show the name in. If they have to be truncated with a “...” anyway, the tooltip will now be the correct item examination tooltip instead of just the name.

Items

Scaling items from instances are no longer marked as Unique, allowing multiple versions of them to exist in your vault or pack.

Housing Decorations - The firework launchers for exterior housing decorations have been updated with bigger and more impressive firework fx.

Quests & Deeds

Carreglyn -- Punishing the Wicked: Previously, if someone spawned the boss fight, but a second player actually tagged and killed the boss, the first player could not complete the quest. The boss now can be respawned.

Carreglyn -- Munfaeril's Warning: There was a bugged that caused a player to not be able to get their quest rewards upon completion. If two players used the same copy of Munfaeril to complete the wrapper, the second player's events got switched so that they spoke to Munfaeril first and used the shrine second, which broke the rewards screen. Now multiple players can complete their quest off the same copy of Munfaeril (if she is not present, the shrine must still be used to summon her, but completion will happen correctly.)

There was a further complication with Punishing the Wicked, which caused the boss to remain stuck in NPC mode. This is being resolved by causing the entire encounter to despawn immediately if combat ends (due to player death, Hide in Plain Sight or other combat-ending skill). The detection hotspot also now has a cooldown of three minutes before it resets the encounter.

The two hostile mobs in Lower Barnavon that were put there due to overwhelming player feedback have been removed due to overwhelming player feedback.